Projects

Theatre

Dambudzo Revisited
by David Pattison
Directed by Ethel Dlamini-Maqeda
Produced by Southern E Media Education & Arts, Sheffield

Using material from his largely autobiographical novels, Dambudzo Revisited looks at the short unhappy life of Dambudzo Marechera. Act One is set in the week before he died. Act Two takes place earlier in a bar in London. The final act is on the day of his death.

Dambudzo ran for 20 performances in November 2007 in Harare's Theatre in the Park, directed by Cont Mhlanga, produced by Daves Guzha, and starring Memory Kumbota as Marechera's conscience. The "other" Dambudzo was played by Mitchell Dzimwasha. Zimbabwe Standard said that it was "a brave attempt at trying to delve deep into the mind of this genius who passed on at 35 years of age on 18 August 1987" (18 November 2007). The play was stopped by the police. A revised version will be presented in Oxford.

Blitzkrieg and The Servants' Ball (University of Oxford)

May 11-15, Moser Theatre, Wadham College, Oxford

"A BLACK HAMLET SOLILOQUISING THE DREAD HOURS AWAY"

Demotic magic and postcolonial absurdism in a fabulous original production at Wadham in 3rd week

Directed by Sophie Lewis (Wadham College) and Matthew Waksman (Somerville College)

Produced by Signy Gutnic-Allen (Balliol College)

The Servants’ Ball Blitzkrieg is an amalgamation of two plays about Zimbabwean independence, two student directors’ creative juices, a puppet maker’s expert fruits, the wild dreams of a skip-diver, and a musical director’s original take on the whole mind-boggling thing. It is an absurdist romance punctuated by poems and ballads, word games and slapstick, poking fun at the new world and lamenting the old, or, perhaps, vice versa.

Sophie Lewis and Matthew Waksman got together under the auspices of the University Marechera Celebration, a symposium (which Sophielle originally helped garner support for) bringing together postcolonialists and artists from all over Africa and the wider world this May. Their show is not a direct homage to Marechera in any way, and takes enormous liberties with its mise en scene, but remains true to what was perceived as the provocative energy and anti-establishment poeticism of his texts.

SBBK, as Lewis and Waksman’s project is known on the inside, tells the story of the re-negotiations taking place in the new age of “re-con-cil-i-a-tion” post Independence, both ‘upstairs’ where the colonials self-congratulate, and ‘downstairs’ where the servants drink chibuku and kachasu. (Or as it happens, inside the lavatory, or outside in the shebeen.)Thomas is the obsequious servant (and opportunistic go-getter) serving Comrade Norman Drake, colonial fat cat par excellence. He and his cronies hang out on the bleachers, together with audience members invited to join them for their haunting dance sequences and their drunken discussions about employment, the minimum wage, or the future of Zimbabwe. Drake, on the other side of the space, presides over a party riddled with double-dealing, hypocrisy and corruption, for which the gruesome toilet is the uncanny symbol.Each actor takes on a ‘Toilet’ and a ‘Servant’ persona by switching costumes audience members are kind enough to hold in the interim.

It seemed natural to piece the plays together to create an upstairs/downstairs effect. We have made the decision to cast both gender and race blind, a decision, we feel, that will ask the audience not only to focus on the issue of class (as much as on the issue of race) but one that will also make the audience question their racial preconceptions. Racial and sexual politics in our production are embodied by an androgynous and racially unspecific ensemble, an experiment in theatre semiotics of a kind Oxford has been severely lacking despite recent forays into ensemble/promenade theatre thanks to E.T.C.

To add to the Absurd elements of the play we have a six piece music ensemble that is both background music and an actual performing band which interact with the actors. The actors play different roles in the different plays and show their character changes subtly and neatly through music and symbolic prop changes. These are two plays about post-independent Zimbabwe, a world of hypocrisy, corruption and naive ideals but these are also two plays with sparkling emotive and Absurdist dialogue which creates much wider identification.

Read more about The Servants’ Ball Blitzkrieg HERE

A Portrait of the Artist in Black-and-White (University of Oxford)

Written and directed by Dobrota Pucherova

Music by Ollie Thomas and William May

Film by Patrick Cahill

Starring: Ery Nzaramba

This multi-media adaptation of selected prose and poetry by Dambudzo Marechera exploits modernist devices such as montage, symbol, and juxtaposition of images to explore the mind-splitting, surreal experience of Charlie, a Rhodesian student at Oxford in the 1970's. Nothing is as it seems in this experimental play that spirals further and further into the cavernous depths of Marechera's texts where love and hatred, Black and White, and myth, illusion and reality dangerously converge.

Film

A Shred of Identity by Nana Oforiatta-Ayim (London)

Based on Marechera's poem "A Shred of Identity", this film looks at the relativity of hidden human suffering vis-à-vis the evident existential suffering of the artist. It takes its cue from the line 'the poem behind this poem' in that nothing is as it seems on the surface, and that all those apparently so secure in their place in the world suffer as much as the artist who makes his or her existential probings into the basis of their creativity.

I Am the Rape by Heeten Bhagat (Harare)

Dambudzo Marechera wrote the poem "I Am the Rape" in response to racial violence perpetrated by the British Police during a National Party Rally in 1979. This visual interpretation of the poem, set amongst images of Zimbabwe past and present, explores the author's traumatic life. The film comments on the continued relevance of Marechera's work and aims to provoke argument, discomfort and reaction through the juxtaposition of words, images and sounds. In line with Marechera's style, the film rejoices in the anarchic and the abstract in the service of a deeper understanding that is essential to comprehend Marechera's poetic expression.

Awoken by Gloria Huwiler and Patrick Ssenjovu (New York)

inspired by "The Lancaster House Dressing table"
by Dambudzo Marechera

Sylph or
Harpy;
Madonna or
Whore?
Or perhaps plain Mrs Andy Capp?
I hear their
Bye-byes,
Gone with the tumult,
All that’s left to resign
Is this whirlwind role
This radioactive image
Of African mutants in transition.

Marechera’s prophetic poem “The Lancaster House Dressing Table” captures the hybrid identity of an African woman in a post-colonial world who cannot decide which role to adopt: that of a “Sylph, or a Harpy, a Madonna or Whore?” Which raises the question, should one try to adhere to the morals of one’s own culture (if an authentic African culture indeed exists) or allow Western norms to permeate and shape modern African society? Or are choices about ones identity and conduct entirely personal?

It is precisely these questions that the film Awoken, a post-colonial take on Katherine Mansfield’s story “Bliss”, grapples with. Patrick Ssenjovu’s modern day re-telling examines Bertha, a mixed-raced woman married to a American in New York. Although Marechera’s poem was written in the immediate wake of independence, the idea of “African mutants in Transition” is equally as pertinent today. Bertha too is caught up in her own whirlwind role, but as Marechera writes, the modern African identity is a dynamic and fluid construct, a radioactive image, constantly changing.

Painting

Fisani Nkomo (Zimbabwe)

Fisani Nkomo (born in 1971 in Mberengwa, Zimbabwe) is a self-trained artist specialising in abstract and mixed-media painting. His works discuss social, political and socio-economic issues. He has exhibited at the Harare International Festival of the Arts and National Gallery in Bulawayo, among others. He was the winner of the second prize at the 2005 Isigodlo Samakkhosi Exhibition.

Photography

Ernst Schade (Portugal)

Music

Chimanimani (UK)

Sculpture

"Dambudzo Marechera and Shona sculpture" by Jonathan Zilberg

It was in 1988 during my preliminary doctoral research on the invention of Shona sculpture when I first came across Dambudzo Marechera's inspirationally radical expressive work by way of that fine glossy booklet by Flora Veit-Wild and Ernst Schade, Dambudzo Marechera: 4 June 1952-18 August 1987 (Harare: Baobab Books, 1988). As I had quickly found that black Zimbabweans had little or no interest in Shona sculpture and was looking into why this was so, I was intrigued to see in the photograph of Dambudzo in his study in Harare a small sculpture on the window-sill. As chance would have it, I soon therafter met Flora and Ernst at Tengenenge and was able to ask them about it. Ernst laughed and said something like: "Oh, Dambudzo felt that Shona sculpture was just something for white men", but if I recall his words were much stronger than that. I also recall that he added that the sculpture meant nothing to him except that Bernard Takawira had given it to him as a token of respect.

Needless to say this was not particularly surprising to me and over the intervening twenty years I have continued to collect evidence along these lines as to how it is that if Shona sculpture is such a vaunted national cultural asset then why are the Shona so indifferent to it - unlike Ernst, who came back excitedly later on that day with a wonderful little stone sculpture by Square Kambeyo of a boy masturbating which I suppose now lives in his house, being an inspirational conversation piece and a most unusual Shona sculpture, especially with Square being of Malawian descent.

But in all seriousness, putting aside the issue of why Shona sculpture is so systematically uninteresting to those in the metropolitan creative art world and the way in which its sales so typically revolve around the puerile commodification of Shona mythology and history, it was simply one line of Dambudzo's that I read in that booklet which I have never forgotten. All these years it has sung out to me like an anthem: "Either you are a writer [read artist] or you are not. If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you."

Copyright © 2008 Marechera Celebration. All Rights Reserved.